Clay Shirky is Right: Newspapers' Death is Journalism's Loss

For journalists of a certain vintage, these are the days on the digital horizon that were long-feared and yet somehow unanticipated. The newspaper world is slowly asphyxiating, starved for the oxygen of classified advertising and simultaneously kicked in the chest by a massive recession that is hastening the tombstones in the graveyard of newsprint. The 148-year-old Seattle Post-Intelligencer will publish its final print edition this week. Huge cutbacks were approved by the staff of the San Francisco Chronicle in an attempt to save the 144-year-old daily. The Rocky Mountain News in Denver closed last month. The publishers of the Minneapolis Star Tribune and both the The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News filed for bankruptcy. The Christian Science Monitor has abandoned print, for a small online operation that keeps the name alive - for now. The survival of even The New York Times is openly debated.

I could go on, but it's too painful. I come from a newspaper family, and worked as a reporter and editor for more than a dozen years, before peeling off for the allure of my own digital printing press in the 90s. I love newspapers, and I've always believed that they're central to the American version of representative democracy - a stalwart check on the power of government.

Yet even with ink in my veins and newsprint in my DNA, the patterns are changing 'round here. On the days that I commute into midtown on the train, The Times is an absolute and granite-carved morning habit. Liberated from its blue bag and advertising inserts at the station, the pattern is as unyielding as the order of the stations: the A section in the Bronx, sports by 125th Street, business in the tunnel, arts and lifestyle at a glance before hitting the platform. But on the days when I work from home - and even on Sundays - much of the paper arrives in the medium I'm typing into right now, and it often arrives via feeds or links from blogs and aggregators. Further, I'm often found reading commentary and reaction about stories in the Times before I've actually read the stories themselves.

Crowdsourcing journalism is all the rage, but the idea of its widespread ascendancy and competence is the exclusive province of either deranged optimists or ideological cyberlibertarians; the vast populace will never produce great journalism - or even sufficient journalism of the kind that has nurtured our republic - any more than it will perform surgery on a widespread amateur basis, or turn out competent oil paintings by the millions.

Yes, occasionally brilliant exceptions will be appear; the tools available for creating and disseminating great stories will be put to good use by people with the talent for reporting and telling those stories. But the journalistic print edifice will be not be replaced - in my view, there will be no great metro bureaus, no overseas reporting staffs, no full-time investigative teams, no cop house reporters, no City Hall beat. A network of thousands and thousands of young reporters taking notes and asking tough questions - and then writing up their reports in public, for the public - at thousands and thousands of school board and town council meetings on gray Tuesday evenings all around the nation will begin to fade.

The Internet has been a destructive force for many business models, but none threatens the basis of the  republic as much as the digital knife busily sawing at the fraying Achilles tendon of American newspapers. As an editorial in the Spokane Review (rather plaintively) asked:

"So as newspapers die, it's worth considering the effects on society. Who will tell the people what their institutions are doing? Who will ferret out the corruption? Who will fend off the legal challenges to public information? If no viable alternative emerges, what does that mean for our representative democracy?

Author and NYU professor Clay Shirky wrote a grim and all-too-accurate assessment of journalism's dire strait, a piece that  really places no blame but captures well the doomsday formula now unfolding:

The unthinkable scenario unfolded something like this: The ability to share content wouldn't shrink, it would grow. Walled gardens would prove unpopular. Digital advertising would reduce inefficiencies, and therefore profits. Dislike of micropayments would prevent widespread use. People would resist being educated to act against their own desires. Old habits of advertisers and readers would not transfer online. Even ferocious litigation would be inadequate to constrain massive, sustained law-breaking. (Prohibition redux.)

As Shirky says, this is not something that proprietors of professional journalism failed to see coming - and they've tried almost every model for revenue generation that came along over the past decade and a half. All have failed. Case in the point: the Times, which gets an amazing 20 million visits to its website every month and still can't come close to touching the revenue of its wounded print sibling. And aggregators from Google to the Huffington Post shave that slim online revenue even further.

The models just don't work - nothing online sustains a newsroom of 100 reporters and editors working in a beat system. Cut and paste works online. Endless commentary works online (but only pays the aggregators, in most cases). Endless links work. Newsrooms do not. As Shirky writes (correctly in my view) the casualty isn't so much the newspaper (and the companies who operate them), as it is the journalist - and professional journalism itself. And that is a huge loss for society that no one should be welcome with glee (though some digital triumphalists cannot seem to restrain themselves):

Print media does much of society's heavy journalistic lifting, from flooding the zone -- covering every angle of a huge story -- to the daily grind of attending the City Council meeting, just in case. This coverage creates benefits even for people who aren't newspaper readers, because the work of print journalists is used by everyone from politicians to talk radio hosts to bloggers. The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; "You're gonna miss us when we're gone!" has never been much of a business model. So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper
people lose their jobs?

I don't know. Nobody knows. We're collectively living through 1500, when it's easier to see what's broken than what will replace it. The internet turns 40 this fall. Access by the general public is less than half that age. Web use, as a normal part of life for a majority of the developed world, is less than half that age. We just got here. Even the revolutionaries can't predict what will happen.

Craig Newmark, creator of the ubiquitous classified network that has hurt the newspaper model, argues that "we need to experiment a lot more" on ways to support the kind of journalism now getting pink-slipped. But I have to say: we've all been making that argument since the mid-90s. The experiments are legion. Yet the corps of full-time paid journalists is shrinking rapidly, and their work cannot be replaced by bloggers or posts on Facebook, as much as may enjoy those social media forms. I was talking with James Wolcott about this earlier this week and he made a great point - who's going to churn out all those important but relatively small-scale exposes on bad government contracts and neighborhood graft, the kinds of pieces regularly published by the tabloids and small city dailies? As Bob Stein writes, apropos of reporting's demise: "For journalism, the goal has never been cosmic verities but everyday truth."

Last year at the Personal Democracy Forum, NYU professor and media critic Jay Rosen gave a talk about the rise of semi-pro journalism that took in some of the still-arrogant attitude of "old journalism" and its resistance to going to way of the dinosaur. He adapted the talk for his blog:

We are early in the rise of semi-pro journalism, but well into the decline
of an older way of life within the tribe of professional journalists. I call them a tribe because they share a culture and a sense of destiny, and because they think they own the press-- that it's theirs somehow because they dominate the practice.

The First Amendment says to all Americans: you have a right to publish what you know, to say what you think. That right used to be abstractly held. Now it is concretely held because the power to publish has been distributed to the population at large. Projects that cause people to exercise their right to a free press strengthen the press, whether or not these projects strengthen the professional journalist's "hold" on the press.

That hold is slipping every day. Yet some of Rosen's set piece, his construction of the central tension in the story, now seems quaint, only nine months later. The attitude of recalcitrant old print journalists doesn't matter any more in this season of shuttered newsrooms. It's not about old journalists versus the rising amateurs. It's about the disappearance of one of the carrying beams of our democracy and what, if anything, will replace it - and the loss of that "everyday truth."

UPDATE: Over at the WiredPen, Kathy Gill has a thoughtful response. She agrees that there is nothing on the horizon to replace newspaper, even while arguing that newspaper-owning companies aren't generally motivated by the public good (true) and that democracy hasn't exactly thrived under the model now disappearing (true, to a degree). These viewpoints are also echoed in some the comments here. Yeah, newspapers aren't public and the big dailies are indeed run by large corporations. But my response is this: that in no way mitigates the loss. Small-scale experiments in online reporting - and we're in 2009, a full 15 years into the mainstream commercial Internet - seem more like the exceptions that prove the rule. What we lose with newspapers is the commonality - that "place" in cities and towns where a good percentage of citizens gathered around news and opinion and recipes for pork chow mein. And Clay Shirky is right - it's a big loss, and there's nothing that can be done about it.

UPDATE II: Will Bunch gets to the heart of an aspect of the "distributed, super-wired world of citizen journalists with blogs will replace newspapers" argument that has been bugging me as well: it's anti-blue collar to its core. Posits Bunch: "I'm trying to point out the unique challenge of preserving journalism and the vital exchange of public information in a Rust Belt city like Philadelphia. A Web-only newspaper might work in the home city of Microsoft, Amazon.com, and Starbucks. In the home city of....lots of civil servants? Not as much. I agree that printed news is a little like dirty bathwater these days, but you can't throw the baby -- a unique, non-transferable readership -- out with bathwater.

Comments

[msbpodcast]

The paper part of the newspaper is dead … Get over it.

Journalism is definitely NOT DEAD.

It has been democratized, localized, opened up, opened on and opened for a new business model.

If you worked as an editor or for an editor, you are going to find that the average person hasn’t suddenly improved in spelling or grammar, logic or comprehension, ability to communicate or in layout skills.

We just have to find you a new way to get news that you write out there; .PDF files on your servers being distributed via RSS files that the Post Office has on their server and that gives access to the latest content for $ would go a long way towards granting you a new lease on life.

The RSS file can even contain the highlights and a little bit of text from the articles which are still on your servers.

Actually, you can extract the words from your articles, remove duplicates, sort them, and let Google be able to include or eliminate an article from a search, present the little highlight snatch of text to let potential readers determine if they are interested and then the post office can: 1) let subscribers access the article OR 2) charge for access to the article.

This last part, subscription fulfillment or piece-meal charging, would be done by the post office. Nobody has ever had a problem paying for a stamp or expected a letter to be delivered without a stamp...

[msbpodcast]

... part 2 ...

Once the “news” becomes the “olds”, say after a week for most articles, let Gooogle have at the original that you can store in a separate server.

a) The transmission of the articles is almost free.

b) The distribution of the articles is almost free.

c) The access is cheap but NOT free and the post office sees to that and that helps them with with their business model.

d) The post office send you a share of the money collected (and YOU KNOW HOW OFTEN AN ARTICLE IS FETCHED OFF OF YOUR SERVERS FROM A PARTICULAR IP ADDRESS.)

There is a business model that would work, it would
1) let new gathering organizations gather news,
2) let readers read,
3) let the post office disseminate and collect payments and disburse funds.

[Shozen1]

Right Dying from the Buddhist perspective
http://www.knowbuddhism.info/2009/03/right-death.html

[Heraklia]

HuffPost's Pick

There's one problem with Internet-only newspapers that no one is talking about: data mining. Readers lose their privacy when reading news online because of the heavy use of targeted adware, spyware and cookies. Online newspapers want to find out everything about their readers in order to create marketing profiles to use in selling advertising.

If you subscribe to a traditional printed newspaper, they know nothing about you except your name and address. If you buy a paper out of the curbside box, or just pick up a discarded copy somewhere, you're completely anonymous. When you're physically turning the pages of a print edition, no one is electronically watching you to see which articles you read. Your choices are your own private business.

I am always aware, when reading online (and posting comments), that I'm being watched, and data is being collected and sold about my reading habits. The same thing happens whenever I search for news on Google; the big G keeps records of my searches. It makes me uncomfortable.

[prog]

Maybe all is not lost:

http://indenvertimes.com/

Much of the Rocky Mountain News staff is starting an online subscription local paper.

Best of luck to them. Subscribe if you live in the Denver Metro area.

[pfrogger]

Let's be honest: the print/TV (MSM) media has let us, the people, down!
Hyper partisan rhetoric, obsequiously fawning up to the politicians and businessmen, misrepresenting facts and evidence, and the BS that is journalistic balance have poisoned our MSM information sources.

The Bush years have just been the most obvious and blatant example of this loss of honor of these current "journalists" They have prayed at the alter of the almighty dollar and have been found wanting. Better they die a quick death, lest they poison more of the American information knowledge base.

I agree that it is a major loss to see newspapers who used to be the peoples' watchdog, and as the 4th estate, add extra checks and balances to the government, businesses, and others for the public good. But those real journalists are long gone. They've been gone for some time. That which has remained has been a stagnant corpse polluting the knowledge base with utter partisan nonsense.

What happened to the great journalists? What happened to fact-checking? What happened to service to the people, conclusions supported by facts? They've either left the building or have been bought to say whatever the teleprompter reads. I will NOT contribute money or time to the survival fo those who have done the people such great harm to the people and fallen in step with their master's orders.

[DesertDogAlpha]

Why is it that newspaper editorial pages know how to solve every other problem, but that newspapers can't keep up with the times and handle their own solvency?

Huffington Post and similar have more to do with the death of newspapers than anything else.

[BluebirdofUnhappiness]

But when the newspapers are gone where will HP and others get their news?

[avraamjack]

Tom,

News gathering entities can be saved - and quite easily at that.

The online subscription model failed because nobody is willing to have a dozen different online subscriptions.

What will work, and generate huge revenue, is one online subscription that works for all the hard news site.

For $9.99 a month, many people will pay to read good journalism. It is easy to track where each user goes and that $9.99 could be divided up to each organization based on usage.

This would easily generate tens of millions of worldwide subscriptions.

It is that simple. It only requires the fortitude to implement the plan.

You are welcome.

.

[levee]

between chip reid and chuck todd - i've got no problem with the death of journalism.

[surfcitysteven]

The horse and buggy of our day. They did themselves in with arrogance that they could continue to be the most important news delivery source. After they failed us on bush, we turned away from them in droves. Waste of paper most of them.

[UKOH]

I really don't understand what all the fuss is about. As Huffington Post proves every day, this is really about a change in delivery mechanism rather than a demise of the journalist. Responsible, balanced, journalism is more necessary in the 21st Century than ever.

The traditional newspapers should just become internet only. It is a much cheaper process than the huge expenses of printing. The business models for survival need to be examined in how to make a living. Possibly even a small contribution for subscription would help; most people would pay a little if that were the only way to get a reasonable perspective. Just like they contribute to PBS.

Personally, although I am nearing 60, I much prefer the internet. It is easy to skim read, I can keep up and save interesting articles for reading later on. A computer search is far easier than trying to find old printed papers.

[canfemlib]

My theory is this:
As the late sixties did their best to encourage people to believe that they did hold power, and that their opinions did matter, it became "newsworthy" to seek out ordinary people's opinions on news events. This proved popular with viewer and readers, as they felt included, and even respected. However, then the opinion became to story and the analysis went out the window, and now, if there is a story about a house burning down, the journalist talks to the victim and totally ignored the analysis by the fire department. The pundits yell about the economic crisis, but no one is trying to explain it. THEN, everyone thinks that an opinion on anything is news, and real informative analysis disappears as the yapping terriers of ignorance take over the media. Who wants six sections of THAT plopped on your doorstep every morning.

[Jsens3]

I agree with the above. Aside from losing the big dollars, what the journalists resent is losing their exclusive place at the information table. Not so long ago, we largely had to accept the journalists' version of events. Imagine the difficulty one would have experienced in 1980 trying to get current German or French views of an international incident. We would likely have accepted the interpretation given by one of the news agencies. Today, the information is available on the Internet. Dan Rather would never have been exposed had things been as they were in 1980.. During the recent mini-skirmish over Swiss banks having to relent on some of their secrecy, I was able to listen to not only Americans, but a couple of excellent discussions on the BBC. Formerly, the advertisers not only got their ads published, but they were able to control content and banish information that might be prejudicial to their financial interests. Political correctness carried to ridiculous lengths reigned supreme (and still does at too many newspapers.) Twenty years ago, you couldn't go online and in a few minutes time review a bill under consideration in the federal or state legislatures; now you can, and you don't have to take the word of a journalist as to what the bill says. Bottom line: I think newspapers are losing simply because they have been supplanted. Are there some drawbacks? Sure. But things seem better now than when newspapers controlled the flow of information.

[Tom Watson - Huffpost Blogger]

Who's arguing for exclusivity? Heck, I don't believe in it - I'm thrilled by the rise of citizen commentary (and occasional actual reporting) and have participated fully since the mid-90s, when I realized that owned a printing press - and could do what I wanted with it.

You're right: newspapers have been supplanted - and, of course, many have hastened their own demise.

But that doesn't mean there's a real loss of social capital out there.

[Roberto31]

Newspapers were supposed to be the nations watchdogs for Congress and what the bozos in DC were doing/. Once people realized their paper was hiding so much of the truth about DC and slanting everything to one side they were doomed. Call the funeral home and get it done. Those buildings can finally find a use that serves some purpose other that absurd so called news. You can fool some of the people some of the time but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time. That is what got them their final resting place.

[Tom Watson - Huffpost Blogger]

Surely Robert, you must realize that coverage of the "bozos in DC" represents a tiny, miniscule fraction of what the 1,000s of newspapers in this country report on, daily and weekly?

[pfrogger]

You've totally missed the point of his comment. Instead of focusing on his exact example, you should have understood the significance and implications of his example. Namely that newspapers were supposed to serve a purpose - objective sources of information supported by facts and evidence for the good of the American people.
With most papers owned by corporate conglomerates or bowing to the all mighty circulation and thus money, they have, for the most part, given up their honor and their duty to the American people.
Their journalistic balance ideals present 2 sides as equally credible, even when the 2 sides may not be equally credible, based on facts and evidence. The print/TV media have given up their mantle as the 4th estate because like me, many do not trust what the print/TV media says or does. And rightly so. It's called fact-checking. Also if you misrepresent information, then you're also culpable.
For these and others and other reasons, I will never contribute money to such dishonest journalism.
I say this not to insult, but to state clearly my reasoning. Nor am I pointing the finger to you, but to the media in general.

[Roberto31]

Once people could get the obituraries on line newspapers became a thing of the past! That was only reason I ever bought one was to check the obits. I say shut them down and sell their presses to a country that requires fair and balanced news if there is such a place. The New York Times is on life supports already and some say will not make it through this year. What a celebration for those who love both sides of an issue that day will be. Americans have been so uese to being brain washed by newspaters distorted and sometimes downright distorted or missing facts it will be a cultural shock for many. Just get over it.